equal justice for rich and poor?  You find warmth in the church, but none in the home?  Warmth in imagining the cloud glories of heaven, but none in creating substantial glories on earth?’ All inspiration’?  If you want inspiration to feeling, to sentiment, perhaps you had better keep to your Bible and your creeds; if you want inspiration to work, go and walk through the East of London, or the back streets of Manchester.  You are inspired to tenderness as you gaze at the wounds of Jesus, dead in Judaea long ago, and find no inspiration in the wounds of men and women, dying in the England of to-day?  You ‘have tears to shed for Him,’ but none for the sufferer at your doors?  His passion arouses your sympathies, but you see no pathos in the passion of the poor?  Duty is colder than ‘filial obedience’?  What do you mean by filial obedience?  Obedience to your ideal of goodness and love—­is it not so?  Then how is duty cold?  I offer you ideals for your homage:  here is Truth for your Mistress, to whose exaltation you shall devote your intellect; here is Freedom for your General, for whose triumph you shall fight; here is Love for your Inspirer, who shall influence your every thought; here is Man for your Master—­not in heaven, but on earth—­to whose service you shall consecrate every faculty of your being.  ’Inexorable law in the place of God’?  Yes; a stern certainty that you shall not waste your life, yet gather a rich reward at the close; that you shall not sow misery, yet reap gladness; that you shall not be selfish, yet be crowned with love; nor shall you sin, yet find safety in repentance.  True, our creed is a stern one, stern with the beautiful sternness of Nature.  But if we be in the right, look to yourselves; laws do not check their action for your ignorance; fire will not cease to scorch, because you ‘did not know.’"[17]

With equal vigour did I maintain that “virtue was its own reward,” and that payment on the other side of the grave was unnecessary as an incentive to right living.  “What shall we say to Miss Cobbe’s contention that duty will ‘grow grey and cold’ without God and immortality?  Yes, for those with whom duty is a matter of selfish calculation, and who are virtuous only because they look for a ’golden crown’ in payment on the other side the grave.  Those of us who find joy in right-doing, who work because work is useful to our fellows, who live well because in such living we pay our contribution to the world’s wealth, leaving earth richer than we found it—­we need no paltry payment after death for our life’s labour, for in that labour is its own ‘exceeding great reward.’"[18] But did any one yearn for immortality, that “not all of me shall die”?  “Is it true that Atheism has no immortality?  What is true immortality?  Is Beethoven’s true immortality in his continued personal consciousness, or in his glorious music deathless while the world endures?  Is Shelley’s true life in his existence in some far-off heaven, or in the pulsing